1. Field
The present application relates generally to aggregation of content from multiple sources, and more particularly to augmenting online content with additional content that is relevant to interests of particular users.
2. Related Art
Aggregation and cross-referencing of online content hosted on multiple web sites, such as Flickr™, del.icio.us, YouTube™, and Facebook® to provide a more unified, comprehensive view of a user's online content such as blog posts, web site bookmarks, videos, and social networking information are known in the art. Lifestreaming refers to a process of collecting and storing information about a person's activities and life by aggregating online content that the person creates and consumes, such as blog posts, social network updates, online photos, and the like.
Blogs, also known as web logs, present content generated by a user. Blogs may cover a variety of subjects, and content entries are presented in reverse chronological order, thereby giving higher visibility to the latest updates. As new posts are added, the older posts become less prominent. The older posts may, for example, disappear from the main page of the web site to a visitor, but since most users view only the most visible, i.e., latest, content, older posts receive few hits.
Lifestreaming enables aggregation of user activities from multiple web sites. Users provide their usernames for web sites such as Flickr®, YouTube®, Last.fm, Netflix®, Twitter®, del.icio.us, Digg™, and the like to lifestreaming providers such as MyBlogLog™, FriendFeed™, Plaxo®, and the like. Such lifestreaming providers crawl web sites and aggregate the latest updates.
Knowledge about recent user activities across different services is not presently used to find posts of interest for a visitor. Such user activity knowledge increases the relevance significantly and enables websites to personalize content for particular users.
MyBlogLog is a network service for use by bloggers, i.e., users who maintain and author content on web log sites. A blogger may register with MyBlogLog to create a blog community for the blogger's blogs. Other users may subscribe to the blog community to receive updates from the blogs in the community. When the blogger adds content to a blog, the content may be syndicated, i.e., provided automatically, to other members of the community.
Existing techniques attempt to increase blog traffic, e.g., the number of readers and/or the time spent reading by each reader, by showing the most popular posts or content, ordinarily select interesting posts to display based upon information about all visitors to a web site or blog. However, these existing techniques do not accurately select content relevant to the interests of individual visitors.